Whenever a new technology emerges, it’s generally greeted with a healthy mix of excitement and skepticism. This was true when chatbots were first invented, and then again with every iteration since. It makes sense to both welcome and challenge technology, since organizations and consumers should only adopt solutions that help them improve and succeed. But when it comes to chatbots in particular, there are some lingering misconceptions that should be cleared up.
To that end, here are four common concerns that people have about this technology, and why — given the latest technological advances — they are truly nothing to worry about.
1. Chatbots don’t deliver what customers want.
Many people think of chatbots in terms of how they used to be when they first arrived on the scene a few years ago. These bots required lots of programming to spit out a particular response to a very limited set of questions. There was no flexibility, and customers frequently received an answer like “I don’t understand” or “Try asking again.” Naturally, this would feel like a dead end and a giant waste of time, leading to frustration and a poor customer experience.
Next-generation chatbots have come a very long way since then, and the reality today is much different. Modern bots use natural language processing (NLP), which can interpret a customer question and the intent behind it, regardless of how it’s expressed in a chat. Wild, right? Here’s how this might look…
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You ordered some new shoes from a company, and they haven’t yet arrived at your house. You go to the brand’s website or mobile chat and type in, “I haven’t received my package” or “My box isn’t here.” Regardless of how the question or statement is phrased, next-gen chatbots are smart enough to read between the lines and figure out that what you really need is to locate where your package is in transit. The chatbot can then quickly guide you to a tracking tool, leading to a faster resolution and a happier customer.
2. The technology is replacing humans’ jobs.
One of the biggest issues that society has had with futuristic tech like artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots is that they’re perceived to take the place of humans. The reasoning goes that if these modern solutions are so smart and can do so many things that people do, there will be fewer jobs for people, which of course is never a good thing. While this line of thinking makes sense, it’s not rooted in truth.
Chatbots don’t eliminate the need for live agents; they supplement them. Companies will always need human beings to handle really complex issues or be available to speak with VIP customers. Chatbots simply free up your agents’ time so they can allocate it toward delivering a higher quality experience during the higher stakes situations, rather than repeating the same basic answers to the same repetitive questions.
Chatbots can also help your team scale up quickly during temporary activity surges, and collect background information about customer issues that will then be routed to an agent, which ultimately lowers resolution time. People will continue to be valuable; the chatbots will just make their jobs easier and better.
3. Chatbots are difficult and expensive to build and manage.
The reality of many older chatbots in the market is that yes, they require an engineering team, dedicated subject matter experts, time and expense to build and maintain. They can drain your resources and may not deliver a better customer experience, which is why many companies have previously avoided even considering them. But it’s important to remember that not all tech is created equally. While this may be the truth for some of the second-rate bots out there, it’s not true of all.
Next-gen chatbots, in fact, are completely different. They’re easier, faster and more affordable to roll out, because they don’t require you to code for every possible question and answer combination you might see. Instead, they can access your company’s help content and use the information there to answer customer questions. Since they’re intelligent, the chatbot learns and updates answers dynamically, meaning you often don’t need any engineering support on an ongoing basis.
More importantly, they can create beautiful, personalized experiences for your users without engineering effort. For example, they can look up a user’s history or data from your CRM or ERP and deliver the specific outcomes that the user needs, or route that user to a specific support channel or queue.
Next-gen chatbots can also deliver more proactive experiences — for example, detecting that a user is in the first 30 days of using your service and recommending educational content after first resolving their current issue. If cost and maintenance are a concern for you, they don’t need to be; you just need to make sure to look at next-gen chatbots instead of legacy ones.
4. Customers get tricked by chatbots, thinking they’re real people.
Finally, some people get weirded out by machines acting like humans. The idea that you can be sitting at your computer and chatting to a support agent named Andy on a website or app, only to later learn that Andy is in fact a bot, can be unsettling. This is only natural; anyone would feel deceived and maybe a bit disturbed if they realized they were venting to a machine and not a person.
But with modern chatbots, there’s no bait-and-switch. Instead, leading chatbots today are conversational but do not pretend to be humans. Most customers find this sort of transparent interaction with bots to be refreshing and helpful, and it sets them up nicely for a seamless handoff to a live agent or even a phone call if needed.
If you’ve held any of these concerns about chatbot technology, you’re certainly not alone. But just as the tech has evolved over time, so have the sophistication and value of next-gen chatbots, eliminating the basis of such concerns. Modern chatbots are designed to elevate the customer experience, free up agents’ time for the conversations where they’re needed most, provide a cost-effective way to boost ROI and much more — and they deliver as promised.
Mahesh Ram is the founding CEO of Solvvy, a machine learning startup reinventing the customer experience with its next-generation chatbot solution. Ram is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in enterprise SaaS. Prior to Solvvy, he was the CEO of GlobalEnglish Corporation, and previously held senior management roles, including CTO, at ThomsonReuters.
